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If you can, make sure the first 70 characters are most relevant to the page content, and readable for the user - if they don't like what they see or it doesn't make sense without the other 70 characters they're unlikely to click through.

You don't mention whether your brand name is included in the tag; unless you're really well known in your niche it usually makes sense to have the brand at the end of the title tag (if at all). I'm an SEO for a couple of news websites where the titles are often well over 70 characters (with the brand names at the end). It doesn't seem to cause any serious problems and we have had high traffic from SERPs with longer titled articles. I advise the editors to put the main keywords near the beginning of the title if possible, with readability (for the human!) being the most important thing.

It won't create a penalty per se, however search engines will be truncating your title tags with a '...', meaning you don't have control of how your title tags look. You're better off trimming them down to something shorter and meaningful, knowing that the appearance of your meta data on SERPs affects your CTR, which affects ranking. Plus, the extra 70 chars aren't helping you, because Google isn't indexing them.

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